No, no, honey, I said to myself. A flag has been raised. Something is not adding up. Almost as a defiant reaction to Zack’s admonition, I called Melinda and told her everything. She was concerned. Always ready for adventure, she suggested we drive down to Manhattan to visit the adoption agency’s old address and confirm the closure for ourselves. We agreed on the next day.
I picked up Melinda at the corner of Park Avenue and Fortieth Street. She was dressed in a blue suit and high heels; she had just concluded a meeting with a client. She hopped in, flung her briefcase in the back of the car, fastened her seat belt, and waved her fist in the air. “I am ready for war,” she announced.
“Oh, please,” I said, smiling. “The agency was your recommendation, remember?”
“Mark’s,” she said. “I was merely the conduit of good hope.”
Yellow was the dominant color in the ever busy Manhattan traffic, thanks to the ubiquitous cabs whose drivers kept giving me the middle finger, a few even lowering their windows to shout something unflattering about female drivers. In her warrior mood, Melinda would shout back or show them the same finger. I didn’t enter the war but continued weaving in and out of the lanes, down Broadway to Chinatown. After circling the block, I got a parking space half a block away from our destination.
The smells of soy sauce and pepper were a cruel reminder to my belly that I had not eaten lunch. Melinda said her tummy agreed with mine, and we entered the very next restaurant. It was crowded with men and women in suits. “Chinatown feeds the business district of New York,” Melinda commented. “Do you know,” she continued as we tackled our chicken and noodles, trying but not too successfully to use chopsticks, “that New York claims this is the biggest Chinatown outside China?” I said, “I’ve heard that Los Angeles makes the same claim.” “And San Francisco,” we said in unison, and laughed.
Our tummies full, we walked on and soon came to the supposed location of Kasla. It was a building with huge padlocks on the metal doors.
“They definitely moved, it’s confirmed,” Melinda said as we stood outside, staring at and then trying the giant padlocks as if they would somehow open at a call of “open sesame.”
My head spun with unanswered questions: the conflicting immunization dates; whether Kobi had nameless parents or a parent named Abla; the links between Kasla, now closed, and the Alaska Enterprises. Melinda’s suspicions of Mark, vague though they were, added to the confusion, but the biggest puzzle was that Zack had called them the day before and they had responded by faxing the papers.
“Zack spoke to somebody,” I said. “That somebody faxed those papers to Zack. So to whom did he speak? From what location? From what machine?”
“Simple. Ask Zack,” Melinda said, but she added a rider: “He probably called, and they faxed him some paper with the hope that he would get off their backs. They may have closed the agency and still exist virtually. You don’t need a physical space in these days of the Internet. As a financial analyst, I deal with many companies that exist online.”
It was plausible. But something was amiss.
“You’re the computer kid. Can you see if this Kasla exists online? Track them down in cyberspace.”
“I will see,” she said. “I am a specialist in cyber warfare!”
Melinda was right about one thing. I should ask Zack. Yes, ask Zack. He had talked of visiting a physical place and not some cyberspace. And then the unthinkable crept in.
Then I did not realize that in a few months, in the deadly Kenyan streets, hunted on all sides by forces that were not yet clear to me, I would shudder at the recall of the sudden attack of doubt, the moment of disbelief, the inner fight to cling to the previous state of certainty, the question rearing its head, barring my attempt to return to innocence: Was Zack involved in deceit, and knowingly?
We were on the road. My instinct was to rush back and confront him. I caught myself pressing heavily on the gas pedal. I pulled over to compose myself.
A little panic seized me. “No, I have to get my facts right,” I murmured to myself, fighting back the doubt. Panic gave way to confusion: Where and how was I going to get the facts? Then I recalled a possible ally. Ben the African.
5
I was in my fourth year at City College of New York when I first met Ben. It was a Friday, and I was walking alone on Amsterdam Avenue, probably mulling, or wallowing in self-pity, over what to do with myself now that my undergraduate studies were coming to an end. A man blocked my way with the oddest of questions: “Are you celebrating Gologo Festival?”
“What?” I asked, wondering what he was talking about. But for the oddity of the question, its sheer unexpectedness, I probably would have ignored the intruder and moved on. I had encountered too many guys who used all sorts of tricks to initiate a conversation.
“Hey, did you forget our day?” he asked.
“Our day?” I said, thinking that this was a case of mistaken identity.
“The day we dance and pray to ensure plentiful rain and good fortune?” he said, handing me a leaflet. He did not even allow me time to read it. He kept bombarding me with questions and unsolicited advice. “How can you call yourself an African and forget to pay homage to our ancestors? No wonder things in Africa are going wrong. We have lost our way.”
I was convinced it was he who had lost it. When I found out that Gologo Festival was indeed celebrated by the Talensi people of Tong-Zug in Ghana, I thought he probably wasn’t that crazy.
Later, I met him again, this time on Nicholas Avenue, in a repeat of the first encounter, only this time he walked alongside me. “So I see that you are going to the dance?’
“The dance?” I honestly did not know of such an event. I thought it was his way of trying to pick me up.
“It’s organized by black students, you know? African Liberation Day. Established on May twenty-fifth in Addis Ababa. Capital of African history. Hail Haile Selassie, King of Kings, Lion of Judah. Ras Tafari. Ethiopia was never occupied by the West. It speaks of our glory. By the way, my name is Underwood. Ben Underwood, but you can call me—”
I dashed to the right abruptly, mumbling something about going to the library, and left him going on about Ethiopia. “Hey, where are you going?” I heard him say, and I could not help a parting shot: “To dig up the glory of our history!” Was he a student? A scholar? A recent arrival on the campus?
It was weeks before I learned that Ben was a police officer, detective division, and often went undercover. Ben was tall and rough-looking, but he had the bluest eyes I had ever seen. Well, on a black brother. Actually, Ben was not black the way Melinda and I were; he was clearly a product of black and white somewhere in his past. He had been serving in the police force all of his adult life, or rather, he had inherited a family legacy of public service: His father and his grandfather had been police officers.
When he wasn’t on duty, he always wore dashiki shirts and a hat, and he often carried a cane. He said it was spiritual. He once asked to see me on an urgent matter. He had something he wanted me to help him identify. He suggested we meet at the café known as Classic. I thought it might have something to do with a criminal investigation, and I felt a momentary sense of power: I, Mugure, a student visa carrier, helping a seasoned New York detective bust a criminal? I had a momentary vision of a gunfight, except that I didn’t like guns, but then I saw myself taking cover behind a police vehicle, hoping not to be caught in the cross fire.
“Hey, Mugure, how can I cook this?” he asked, holding a white oval rootlike plant in his hand. We had hardly ordered our coffee.
“Where did you get it?”
“Chinese market.”
“A crime scene?” I asked, still in my cross-fire mood.
“No, no, a regular market. They sell all sorts of herbs, alternative medicines.”
“What is it?” I asked, taking a closer look, a little disappointed.
“You should know. The seller, an old Chinese man, told me it was an African root. That’s why I bought it. Here, hold it, doesn’t it ring a bell?”
“Ben,” I said after briefly looking at the root and giving it back to him, “this could be from anywhere, really!”
“But it’s African! Just tell me how to cook it, and the ingredients . . .”
I had to end this. “Okay. Listen carefully. Boil it, but don’t drink the liquid or eat the root. Go to the nearest tree and pour libation to our ancestors while chanting a sacred song or poem to our ancestors.”
“Thank you, Mugure,” he said, and started reciting Senghor’s “Prayer to Masks.”
People in the café had stopped to look at him. I wanted the floor to open and swallow me instantly. “Ben, no, not here. Under a tree with a huge trunk and big roots,” I said, tugging at his dashiki.
That’s when I started calling him Ben the African.
He read quite a lot and was fun to be with, and I suspected that in his work, he put the comical Ben aside. Or maybe it was his cover. I accepted an occasional coffee date with him. He would not touch alcohol; he had a theory that it was a drug the white man had used to weaken the minds and bodies of Native Americans, Australians, and the Canadian First Nations. “Poison and plunder” was how he put it. White people were behind the drug trafficking aimed at ensnaring black folk.
He was attached to a unit working on the World Trade Center remains after 9/11. Believing there was a conspiracy to hide the number of African, black, and non-Caucasian victims, he spent his free time researching this aspect, using his skills as a historical detective, checking dental remains . . . During these conversations, I would drift away, and when he noticed, he would try to recapture my attention with more dramatic theories.
Sometimes I wished I hadn’t told him I came from Kenya—what he called the land of Barack Obama’s African ancestors—for whenever I met him, in company or alone, he would talk endlessly about his friend Detective Johnston. Apparently, Ben had been sent on a secret mission to track down some white drug dealers who, disguised as Somalis, used piracy as a cover for their nefarious trade, which somehow reached major American cities. Ben had chased the gang across forests and valleys but had lost them in the north, near the Somali border with Kenya. The less well-known East African drug route was beginning to rival the one through Nigeria, although it had not reached the Mexican border. On the way back, his Land Rover got stuck in the mud, and he found himself encircled by a thousand spears.
Ben regretted that he did not know African—he called all African languages “African”—and so could not talk to his black brothers. The white man’s language had come between him and his people, he lamented. He would have died that day if Detective Johnston had not aided him. Johnston was then in a division that worked to keep smugglers from crossing borders and was on a routine patrol. That was how they first met, in the wild, a kind of black Livingstone and Stanley—Ben, I presume?—and then became lifelong friends. I was pretty sure Ben’s Johnston was not real, and no spears had ever encircled him, and the chase was a rewrite of a western on an African landscape. It was Ben playing the hero in stereotypical African villages. I expected his fantasy to take him to the next level—killing a lion in hand-to-claw combat—but it never came to that.
I don’t know at what point Ben fell in love with me or claimed to do so. At first I thought him merely playful when he talked about my dark skin. I was the dream woman who would supplement the black side of his heritage. “You see, Mugure? Look at my Bob Marley skin and yours. My white great-great-grandfather raped my black great-great-grandmother. I must marry deep black to strengthen my black heritage.”
I could never offer him anything deeper than friendship and the name Ben the African, for which he seemed eternally grateful. When he found out that I was dating white boys, he was really upset, as if I had betrayed him and my Africanness. At first he thought that I was merely experimenting and would outgrow the desire, but when I told him about my relationship with Sam, he became visibly shaken. No matter how hard I tried to convince him, Ben refused to meet Sam. His love changed into a mission to rescue me from my white captors and restore me to my African roots. At times I felt as if he had been sent by my father, whose farewell words were a call for me to beware of white boys.
Ben’s missionary fervor never wavered, even after my marriage to Zack. Ben had worked in every precinct in New York but moved to the Bronx a year or so after my wedding. I sometimes suspected that he’d befriended Zack in order to keep an eye on me.
But now, in my hour of need, it meant I didn’t have far to drive, and I was grateful. The precinct seemed empty, with only a few officers walking about. Ben welcomed me to sit, his desk between us. A map of Africa hung on his wall, and little wooden sculptures were positioned across his desk. His taste in African art was good: The sculptures were very much alive, not the wood carvings of giraffes and elephants so beloved by tourists.
“The Kasla agency?” Ben asked after I had told him the reason for my visit. “Hmmm, well, well. And this is the agency that assisted you in adopting Kobi, you say?”
“Yes.”
“Tell me, Mugure,” he asked directly. “Why did you marry Zack?”
“Ben, I came to you for help, not marriage counseling,” I said, taken aback.
“Sorry, sister. The question may have come out awkwardly, but how well do you know Zack?’
I kept quiet. What could I tell him? That Zack was born of Estonian parents? That he was obsessed with his grandfather the way his father, Eha, had been? That he frequently made trips to Estonia and Eastern Europe and stayed for days without contact?
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“His background, that kind of thing. Do you know anything about his business dealings in Estonia? Eastern Europe?”
How could I bring myself to pour out my personal feelings to Ben? I had been to Estonia once. On our honeymoon. Via Finland. Zack had told me that a boat ride to Estonia from Helsinki would be a more personal entry into the land of his forefathers. We sat on the deck, I leaning on Zack’s shoulder, and as the cruise ship drifted on the Baltic Sea, we watched Helsinki, with its forests and lakes and towers, disappear in the distance. Then it was us, the boat, and the blue waters. The excitement coursing through his body as we disembarked and touched the land of his forefathers became mine. No, no, I was not about to share that with Ben.
Instead, I wanted to tell him about our stay in a hotel by the medieval market in the old part of Tallinn, where I never stopped marveling at the centuries-old buildings; the feel of cobblestone under my shoes; the iron streetlamps that lit up the lanes; and the occasional horse-drawn carriage. We often sat in the sidewalk cafés and watched bridal parties walking by; the huge churches with Gothic spires against the skyline and the flowers all over the courtyards provided a romantic background for wedding photographs.
“But you never actually met any of his family or business associates?” Ben asked, interrupting my thoughts with his eyes still fixed on me.
“Come to think of it, I never did,” I said.
“Have you been to his office?”
“Actually, no,” I said, and felt even more foolish. “But I know some of his colleagues. David West is Zack’s childhood friend.”
“Mugure, what exactly are you looking for? What are you hoping to find?”
“Nothing, I hope,” I said, laughing sheepishly, trying hard not to appear stupid. I found it difficult to admit that I harbored doubts about my husband. “Just curiosity. Why would an agency shut down after sending Zack a document that contradicts the original?”
I thought Ben would laugh off my question, but he didn’t. He continued staring at me, as if waiting for more reasons. To try and gauge what he was thinking, I used an argument closer to his heart. “You always talk about black people knowing our past. Isn’t it natur
al that a mother should want to know her child’s past?”
“Yes, but this is different. Listen, sister. If your child is adopted legally and you have no problems with him or anyone, I don’t see why you need to look any further. Just let it go.”
I was taken aback by the statement; it was an echo of what Zack had told me.“Yes, but I . . . I just . . .” I paused.
“May I ask you another question?’
He was being a little too formal, and yet I didn’t want him to be personal.“Ben, you can ask anything.”
“Except about your marriage,” he said. “Did you handle the transactions yourself?”
“No.”
“And the people or person who brought the baby, did you see them?”
“I was too excited to see anyone but the baby. Why?” I asked guardedly.
“Because if you did, you could help me by describing the people you dealt with.”
“Zack handled everything.”
“If I were you, sister,” Ben said after some silence, “I would let sleeping dogs lie. But I will snoop around, look up some files, ask the other officers. If something comes up, I will call you.”
He had told me that to mollify me, I said to myself. Still, I was surprised that he had echoed Zack’s words. Perhaps I’d better stop shadowboxing with ghosts, I thought.
But I didn’t see any harm in making one more trip to the agency.
• • •
In under half an hour, I pulled up to the street and parked in a lot across from the padlocked building. For a moment I stood there, confused, wondering if I had come to the wrong street or the wrong address. The shop, padlocked yesterday, was now open. I jumped out of the car and half ran toward it, as if I feared it would close again. I entered.
It was a curio shop. There was no one in sight. I stood there looking at all manner of wood carvings of lions, giraffes, zebras, elephants, rhinos, spear-wielding Maasai, and heavily but colorfully beaded women. They reminded me of the ones I had seen in Ben’s office, with the same vitality. Had Ben gotten his from here? Just then I saw the head of a rhino coming toward me from inside the shop. I felt like running out, but curiosity and my mission held me in place. The man playing the rhino removed the mask and stood behind the counter. He was tall, bald, midforties, dressed casually in beige pants and a white shirt, a less frightening figure now.
The Fall of Saints Page 4